Her husband, however, did not laugh. The affair had become a public scandal. Even in the streets, people laughed and jested about the infatuation of the King, and “talked with the utmost freedom of his Majesty and of the corruption and debaucheries of his Court.”[149] If Condé had little love for his wife, he was exceedingly jealous of his honour, and, to Henri’s intense chagrin, absolutely declined to accept the odious rôle he had intended for him, and began, in his Majesty’s phrase, “to play the devil.”[150]
In vain, the King endeavoured to reassure him as to the innocence of his intentions; in vain, the Constable, at his Majesty’s request, made the strongest representations to his son-in-law. Condé was deaf to all appeals, and, towards the middle of June, carried off his wife to Valery, in the hope that, during his absence, the King’s passion might cool or be diverted to some fresh object.
Henri IV. was in despair. In obedience to his orders, the poet Malherbe consented “to degrade his muse to the office of pander,”[151] and composed stanzas wherein the King, under the name of Alcandre, cries:
Il faut que je cesse de vivre
Si je veux cesser de souffrir;
and the princess, under the name of Orante, replies:
La cœur outrée du même ennui,
Jurait que s’il mourait pour elle,
Elle mourait aussi pour lui.[152]
Condé and his wife remained at Valery until the first week in July, when they were compelled to return to Court, in order to attend the marriage of César de Vendôme, Henri IV.’s eldest son by Gabrielle d’Estrées, and Mlle. de Mercœur. The King’s passion became more violent than ever, and his conduct would have been ludicrous to the last degree had it been less culpable. Not only did he continue to commission Malherbe to bombard the princess with elegies and sonnets, but “one saw him alter in less than no time his hair, his beard, and his countenance.” He who had hitherto been distinguished from the nobles of his Court by the simplicity and even negligence of his attire, might now be seen dressing and adorning himself with as much care as the youngest and most dandified of his courtiers, and, on one occasion, he appeared at a tilting-match wearing “a scented ruff, a doublet with sleeves of Chinese satin, and the colours of the Princesse de Condé, who called him ‘her knight.’”[153] “The King is well and grows younger every day,” wrote Malherbe to his friend Peiresc.